Poppy Adams Quotes & Sayings

I wasn't quick-witted or confident enough to play them at their cruel games. I'd feel the heat rush to my face as I flumbed for a rebuff, and I'd become highly aware of my heavy bottom lip, the position of my hands, of my entire body, and I'd end up looking silly and uneasy. I'd walk away hearing the other girls snigger, and it hurt. I didn't cry, but each time it changed something in me, deep down, shaping who I was and who I would become. Each time less confident yet stronger, more insular yet more self-contained. — Poppy Adams

Once you decide on the best poison for the termination, you must work out the correct concentration. For instance, I know that five milligrams of cetratranic acid dropped into a bell-jar with a single moth will take about three seconds to stun it. I know that seven milligrams will anaesthetize it and ten is enough to kill it, providing the moth does not weight more than 3.5 grams. I also know that to kill fifty moths you need five times the concentration or volume of killing fluid, but to kill seven thousand you'd need only two hundred times the concentration. I know that potassium chloride could never kill a larger moth and potassium sulphide would only ever be strong enough to anaesthetize it. I know that cyanide kills anything. But what I don't know right now is the precise amount I will need to kill Vivien. — Poppy Adams

A moth is such a simple machine in the animal world - the go-kart to the modern car - and it takes a lot of glitches to prevent it going. It's this intriguing simplicity, the idea that you could pull it into its constituent parts and put it back together in the same rainy day, that if you pulled back the skin, you could watch the inner workings, that makes a moth such an absorbing creature to study. Moths have a universal character: there are no individuals. Each reacts to a precise condition or stimulus in a predictable and replicable way. They are pre-programmed robots, unable to learn from experience. For instance, we know they will allways react to a smell, a pheromone or a particular spectrum of light in the same way. I can mimic the scent of a flower so that a moth will direct itself towards that scent ... — Poppy Adams

People see the cleverness of nature and suppose it's the cleverness of the animal itself but it was obvious to me that each and every segment of the animal isn't aware. How much I'd hate to live totally unaware of myself, I thought. What would be the point of living, of existing, if you weren't ever to know about it? I looked at the Fox Moth and pitied it, poor unconscious creature. But then, I supposed, at least it wouldn't be disappointed. It would never find out. — Poppy Adams

I love her and hate her at the same time. I even love the parts of her that I hate, her vitality and her colour, her disruption and disorder, her humour and her despair, her conceit and her narcissism, her everything that isn't me. — Poppy Adams

I feel like the caterpillar that we think is making a choice when he eats or pupates but, in fact, is not. He's ruled by molecular forms of incluence acting on the base components of a moth. Likewise, perhaps I have become a killer through circumstances acting on my biological make-up. Which means, of course, that none of this is my fault and that it's all out of my hands. — Poppy Adams

That's what everyone forgets these days: there's a fine line between sanity and insanity. Lots of people are on the edge. We can't be in perfect balance all the time. — Poppy Adams